Quebec must not be allowed to spit in the face of the majority of its fellow citizens and oppress its English\u002Dlanguage minority, while cheerfully pocketing…
The system of equalization payments drawn from the most prosperous provinces and paid to those with per capita incomes below the national average was devised in the mid-1950s as a method of asserting the constitutional importance of the federal government after Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis had forced the federal government of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent to recognize the co-equal right of Quebec to assess income taxes. All provinces have since asserted that right.
The dissolution of large countries into their constituent parts has become relatively commonplace in recent decades. The disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not entirely the failure of communism: the secession of 14 constituent republics apart from Russia was more exactly a rejection of Russian dominance of the many ethnicities over which Russia, under the Romanovs as under the Communists, asserted itself.
Canada has the great distinction of having devised its own political institutions, unlike most decolonized countries, and the result is that it has, since 1867, been the only transcontinental, bicultural, parliamentary confederation in the history of the world; it is a system of government of grandeur and imagination and it is one that has withstood the test of time as one of the world’s oldest continually operating democracies, alongside the United Kingdom and United States.
In the life of Canada’s Confederation, France has had a Bonapartist empire, a brief civil war, three republics, a dictatorship that was a satellite of Nazi Germany and a government in exile, an outright Nazi occupation and two provisional governments.
The federal government should seek the support of all three anti-separatist opposition parties in suspending any transfer payments to any province that does not recognize the full and equal rights of both founding cultures, and should unambiguously declare that both official languages will continue to be used in all federal government workplaces and federally chartered corporations and institutions throughout Canada.
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